1. Field
The present invention relates generally to automatic control of software application programs and image analysis and, more specifically, to analyzing graphical user interface (GUI) images displayed by an application program for automatic control of subsequent execution of the application program.
2. Description
Typical application program analysis systems capture keyboard input data and mouse input data entered by a user. The captured input data may then be used to replay the application program. These systems rely on playback of the application program on the same computer system used to capture the input data, and thus are not portable.
Some existing application program analysis systems use image recognition techniques that are dependent on screen resolution and/or drawing schemes, or have strong dependencies to the underlying operating system (OS) being used. Such systems typically rely on dependencies such as Windows32 or X-Windows application programming interfaces (APIs). This limits their portability and usefulness.
Hence, better techniques for analyzing the GUIs of application programs are desired.